


Make it up as we go along (Feet on the ground, head in the sky)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Food, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, h50 episode 8.06, h50 season 10, mentions of Steve/Emma Okino and Steve/Brooke Gardner, there's talk about sex in this but nothing explicit, this might be crack but i genuinely don't know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24281806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: It’s a lot harder to micromanage Steve’s health if heknowsDanny is doing it. It makes Steve go all stubborn and offended, like a dog that figured out you put medicine in that slice of Gouda you offered it. It’s easier to keep Steve out of the loop and not to risk him spitting out the cheese.Or: Danny takes being a concerned friend very, very seriously, somewhat to the detriment of Steve’s dating life. Also, there’s spaghetti.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 32
Kudos: 267





	Make it up as we go along (Feet on the ground, head in the sky)

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve once again been thinking about Danny’s utter lack of boundaries when it comes to inserting himself into Steve’s dating life, and somehow it turned into a fic about spaghetti. This was not _supposed_ to be about spaghetti, but I ended up holding a real life measuring tape to a real life noodle somewhere in the writing process anyway, so I hope that effort paid off and the gritty pasta realism shines through. Smell that uncooked, unseasoned spaghetti, people.
> 
> This takes place sometime in season 10 and Brooke and Emma, two women Steve dates in canon in that season, are mentioned but not present. There are also some vague spoilers for 8.06 in this, but if you don’t already know what happens in that episode, you might not even notice.
> 
> The title is from _This Must Be The Place_ by Talking Heads, and it’s there mostly because that’s what I was listening to on repeat today and I needed something to keep myself from calling this entire fic _Ready, Set-y, Spaghetti_ and then regretti-ing it the next day.

“Danny,” Steve says, when he enters the kitchen. He’s just letting his phone slip back into his shorts pocket and there’s a quizzical wrinkle between his brows, so Danny returns to his tomato after a brief glance up. It’s already sliced, but he continues chopping it anyway. Tomato cubes might just be the innovative new approach Italian cuisine has been waiting for. “I just got a call from Emma.”

“Oh?” Danny asks. Cubes are boring. Maybe he should go for mush. “You not eating here tonight?”

“No, I definitely am.” Steve must have noticed by now that Danny is doing his best to ignore him, because he comes closer. He doesn’t insert himself in Danny’s personal bubble, but he enters the space of the ingredients Danny has laid out on the counter to make the cooking process run smoother, which makes Danny check up on what Steve’s doing on reflex to prevent any shenanigans that will ruin his grandma’s spaghetti recipe. Steve knows Danny well enough that this was probably a calculated move to get the attention he apparently wants.

“What?” Danny asks, giving up on the chopping for the time being and facing Steve head on. It’s probably better to act normal, anyway.

Steve steals a carrot slice and pops it in his mouth, and the only reason he doesn’t get popped in the head for that is that Danny is still holding his tomato-red knife and doesn’t feel like adding other kinds of red to it. “Oh, nothing. I’m just wondering why the hell you called Emma’s clinic pretending to own a sick bunny rabbit and then tried to get her to tell you if she’s brought me to orgasm recently. What exactly is wrong with you?”

Steve sounds genuinely curious. Danny is pretty sure that calm is just a thin veneer and as soon as he scratches it a bomb might go off. To be fair, if he’d been in Steve’s position, he would have been yelling already. “That’s crazy,” he says. It’s one of the very few things he could possibly have said that isn’t a lie. “Where’d you get that story?”

“Emma. She told me.” 

Danny officially puts the knife down. He pushes the cutting board away and grabs an onion that was resting just a few inches from Steve’s waist. He’s not really sure what he intends to do with it, seeing as he just shoved his sharp thing and the safe place to put the sharp thing on away, so he ends up just holding the onion like a ball in the palm of his hand.

“Are you calling her a liar?” Steve asks.

“No.” Danny, while ticked off, can admit that wouldn’t be fair. “I just hoped she wouldn’t say anything. I asked nicely.”

Something flashes in Steve’s eyes. It might be anger, but it’s probably far worse than that. It’s understanding. “Brooke?”

“Yeah.” Danny is just a little too chicken to put more words to it than that. Steve has almost definitely guessed right and is trying to figure out if Danny had a similar hey-there-can-I-politely-inquire-about-your-sex-life-as-it-pertains-to-my-partner talk with Brooke, but there is still that slight chance Steve meant something else.

Brooke’s answer was sadly much the same as Emma’s more recent one, in that she basically told Danny to fuck off. She did agree not to mention anything to Steve, but that might have had more to do with her feeling strange about it than whether she agreed with Danny that it would be best if Steve wasn’t informed. It’s a lot harder to micromanage Steve’s health if he _knows_ Danny is doing it. It makes Steve go all stubborn and offended, like a dog that figured out you put medicine in that slice of Gouda you offered it. It’s easier to keep Steve out of the loop and not to risk him spitting out the cheese.

Too late for that now, obviously. Thanks a lot, Emma.

Steve’s face is a little horrified, much the same way Brooke’s was when Danny stopped her in the schoolyard a few weeks ago. “She’s been ghosting me since a little after Valentine’s. Jesus Christ, Danny, now I know why.”

“I never told her to do that,” Danny says. He did not. He in fact offered to put their calendars together and figure out what might be a good night for Danny to randomly decide to go out and not come home until well after midnight. He never got that far with Emma, because by that point she was already telling him he was being inappropriate.

Steve crosses his arms and just stares at Danny for a few seconds. “What the fuck is all of this?” he asks, and ah, there is the first crack in the façade, with a little of the anger peeking through. “Why are you harassing women I’m dating?”

“Okay, A, I didn’t harass anyone.” He needs that to be clear. He left them alone the minute they told him to. “And B, I should think it’s fairly obvious. The counselor was very clear about regular intercourse being a major stress relieving factor-”

Steve’s arms fall from their cross at the same time his mouth falls open. “That was _two years_ ago, Danny!”

“Science doesn’t just change, Steve!” Danny yells back. “Your relationship status did, because you went from dating Lynn, which was fine, to never letting anyone help you get your rocks off ever-”

“Oh, seriously! It’s not like I was, what, denying myself, or whatever you seem to be thinking. I masturbate, Danny, I know how to-”

“I know that!” Not for _sure_ , of course, because he’s not an actual stalker and draws a hard line at putting up cameras in Steve’s bedroom, but he does know the lube bottle in Steve’s nightstand gets used occasionally, and he assumes it’s not for greasing car parts. “It’s not the same.”

There’s a flush high on Steve’s cheeks, like he’s been running a marathon in the Hawaiian midday sun and forgot to drink his first liter of water that morning. “And you can’t think of any easier ways you could have gone about this? Ones where you wouldn’t have had to embarrass me and weird out those women?”

“Sure, but that’s not really the problem, is it?” Danny knows he has flaws, and he’s acutely aware of them, but a lack of imagination is not something he’s ever been accused of. He _has_ given this some thought.

“It’s not?” Steve asks, like he doubts exactly that.

“No!” Danny thumps his own chest with the onion. “I’d fuck you myself in a heartbeat, but obviously I can’t do it. I don’t have the right equipment for your tastes.”

Steve looks struck dumb for a moment, and then, with no warning, his eyes skitter down and up again along Danny’s body.

Danny drops the goddamn onion. It sails straight down and lands on the tile floor with a smack and a crunch of the dry outer layer. He has to crouch down to get to it, but Steve is there first and Danny very nearly grabs Steve’s hand by accident, which is already engulfing the thing. They both get up and neither of them thinks to take a step back, which means they end up standing stupidly close. Steve puts the onion on the counter and Danny looks at it and kind of wants to push it off the edge and back to the floor.

Before he has to decide if he’s really that petty, Steve distracts him. “Who says?”

“Who says what?”

“That you wouldn’t be enough.”

That makes Danny whip his head up. “Nobody,” he says, offended, because that’s the first he’s heard of it. “What? Who said that?”

Steve looks about ready to steal the onion again and hit him over the head with it. “You did. You said you didn’t have the right parts and I’m trying to figure out where the hell you got that impression, but you just keep-”

“ _Where_?” Danny repeats, wondering far more about the how. How did they get here, again? “From you! You’re straight. What would you need with-”

“I’m as straight as your goddamn spaghetti, Danny.”

Straight as spaghetti, what the hell is Steve even- “It’s uncooked. There’s literally not a single form of pasta that’s _more_ straight than uncooked spaghetti.”

Steve glares at him and then at the bundle of spaghetti next to the onion on the counter, like it’s the pasta’s fault for not having been dunked in boiling water yet. In the meantime Danny’s brain is catching up and he’s putting together one and one and coming up with a three dollar bill, and he’s about to say something and maybe let Steve off the hook for his failed metaphor when Steve reaches out, past Danny, for the spaghetti. 

For a moment, Danny thinks it’s Steve’s turn to swipe food to the floor because it’s not cooperating, but Steve just picks out one single strand of spaghetti – a spaghetto, as it happens, but Steve probably wouldn’t appreciate Word Of The Day calendar knowledge right then – and holds it up between them, almost a foot of very thin pasta caught in the middle between Steve’s thumb and forefinger. “Look,” he says, and Danny looks, and lo and behold: it’s a spaghetto with a production error. There is a distinct curve at one end, like a tiny little hook made of dough.

“Right,” Danny says, not particularly impressed. Then the point Steve is making slams back into him – straight but with a curve, straight but bendable under the right circumstances, straight but maybe not ever even really that straight at all but just pretending the whole time – and he’s still not impressed by the noodle itself, but it does suddenly seem like the most interesting object in the entire universe. “Huh. So-”

Steve cuts him off. He’s still holding the pasta, but he’s staring over it at Danny intently, with a focus like someone’s life might be on the line. “What about you?” 

Danny shakes his head. “Cooked,” he admits, because that happened a long, long time ago. Hawaii is boiling hot and has a lot of salt water and more than enough pretty guys who can’t keep their shirts on that you can fling yourself against to check if you’re done yet. He used to think he was al dente, and then he left New Jersey.

“Alright.” Steve puts the spaghetto back with its buddies and, just like that, turns and makes his way to the door.

“Hey!” Danny calls, because “cooked” and “alright” just can’t be how this conversation ends. “Is there a fire? Where are you going?”

Steve stops and turns like he was expecting it. He waves a hand in the direction of the dining room. “To set the table.”

“I’ve barely even started,” Danny points out. “Those plates will have collected dust by the time we can eat.”

Steve totally passes by that obvious opening to make some kind of quip about Danny’s cooking skills or advancing age or choice of recipe. He just shrugs. “It’s going to take some time to find the good candles and I might need to iron the table cloth before we can use it.”

“Candles and-” Danny stops, considers this, and then stops considering it. “Why?”

“You kept trying to set me up, so now it’s my turn.” Steve points at him. It’s barely a step away from finger guns. “I’m setting you up _and_ fixing your problem for you.”

“Which is?”

“Figuring out how to get me laid.” Steve grins, wide and cocky, the way he does when he wants people to know that _he_ knows he’s cute. “You can thank me later.” With that, he once again tries to make his escape.

“Hey!” Danny says, also again, and Steve turns back, leaning on the door jamb to get at least his head back into the kitchen because he very nearly succeeded in getting away this time. On the other hand, he doesn’t really look like he got caught trying to flee. He watches Danny expectantly and Danny forgets whatever dumb thing he was about to say about how that’s not the way you proposition someone. “What do we need a table cloth for? Use that time to run to the store and get us some wine that doesn’t taste like shit.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “My wine doesn’t taste like shit,” he says, pushing off from the jamb. “But I’ll look for something nicer,” he adds, loud enough to make sure Danny hears it even though Steve’s already around the corner.

Danny watches the empty doorway for a moment, tempted to follow Steve and suggest they skip dinner entirely, because who the hell cares about wine when you’ve already known each other through and through for a decade. But he has that mashed tomato that’s slowly going bad, and the beef is already thawed, and he’s old and wise enough to care about food waste. He goes on the hunt for that one pot that has just the right size but that Steve and Junior always put in different cupboards after washing it.

He has some pasta to cook, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Please stay safe and stay indoors, the perfect place to enjoy spaghetti and/or consider leaving a comment on fic. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
